


Crawl

by Trash



Category: Original Work
Genre: Cages, Gen, hurt comfort bingo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-05
Packaged: 2019-11-12 08:31:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,486
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18007424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trash/pseuds/Trash
Summary: Jude should have tried harder.





	Crawl

It’s four am, which means Jude is on shift at the Easy Stop Diner. With his Robert Smith-esque hair and black nail varnish it’s easy for people to assume he took the graveyard shift for aesthetically pleasing purposes. He doesn’t correct them. 

Doesn’t tell them that between midnight and eight am is the quietest shift, meaning he sees less people. Doesn’t tell them about his crippling social anxiety, or that the mad cunts he serves in that eight hour window are the only people he can relate to on any level. 

Doesn’t tell them about his mum and her shame. Should have applied yourself at school, she told him. Should have tried harder. 

He doesn’t want people to think he’s mental. Not straight away, anyway. Let them come to their own conclusions. 

Four am, and Ray the lorry driver is the only customer. He’s been in the toilet cracking one off for about ten minutes, which is longer than usual. Maybe his phone is out of battery so he can’t get on PornHub. Ray doesn’t strike Jude as someone with a particularly imaginative wank bank. 

Four am, and Jude is scrubbing at a stain on the Formica by the til when the door opens, bringing road noise and petrol smell into the diner for a second, closes again. 

“Just a minute,” he says to whoever, because he is hyperfixated in this stain now and fucked if he’s stopping now. 

“I’m in a hurry,” says the customer, evenly. Their voice is so surprisingly devoid of emotion that Jude looks up. 

This bland guy, this human embodiment of the colour beige, looks at him from a face Jude wouldn’t be able to pick out of a lineup. “What would you like?”

“Do you know anything about cars?”

Jude sighs. “Not really, mate. Better off ringing Green Flag.”

“Can’t you come and have a look? I just need to put more oil in but I don’t know where it goes.”

It takes everything in his power not to roll his eyes. “Sure,” he says, chucking his cloth in the general direction of the sink. “Let me get my coat.”

“You won’t need it,” the man says, “it’s not cold.”

Jude can’t be arsed to argue, follows the man out to the carpark. The man unlocks the car as they approach. There’s a baby seat in the back, baby detritus littering the passenger footwell - a dummy, an empty packet of Rusks, baby wipes. These things come back to him, later, when he thinks about what a fucking idiot he is. That and the colour of the car. Blue, maybe. It looked black under the sickly glow of the carpark lighting. 

The beige man opens the bonnet, props it open and steps back. Jude leans in. “Here,” he says, pointing, “just unscrew this, pour in the oil, check the dipstick, the end.”

“Mmm,” the man says. Or maybe he actually says something, Jude isn’t sure, because suddenly there’s a rag across his mouth and he’s being held in place. 

He struggles, panicked, lashes out and kicks back. Connects with a shin over and over and over but there’s no effect and he can’t breathe with the rag over his nose and mouth and there’s something on it and he should have never ever followed this guy out to his fucking car and he didn’t even get that stain out of the Formica and he hasn’t ever...

***

Jude wakes up in a cage. 

It takes a while for this realisation to hit him. And when it does it comes with a wave of nausea. He leans over and vomits, retches until his abdomen aches. 

Naked. He’s naked in a cage. 

It’s only as wide as his arm span, isn’t tall enough to stand up in. He isn’t alone, either. Beyond the bars are more cages, rows and rows of them, some empty, some occupied. And the cages seem to be in a barn. Hard to tell. It’s still dark. For no reason he thinks of Ray, wanking himself blind in the toilet at the diner. Will he notice Jude has gone? Will he ring the police? Probably he'll just rob the place. 

He peels his tongue away from the roof of his mouth and swallows hard. “Hello?” He tries, voice breaking. Louder, “what the fuck is going on?”

“Shut up,” someone shouts back. “Shut up or they’ll come and check on us.”

“Where are we? What’s happening?”

“Shut. Up.”

Or what, Jude thinks, what are you going to do? He starts screaming, almost uncontrollably. His voice echoes around the barn, and is soon joined by others begging him to be quiet. Please, please, you have to be quiet. Please, they’ll come.

Let them come, Jude thinks. 

And they do, eventually. He has shouted himself hoarse by the time a door somewhere slams open then closed. Heavy footsteps make their way through the rows of cages, along with a sound he can’t recognise. Then he does. Puts him in mind of being a child, dragging a stick along the park railings. 

Someone is dragging something along the cages. 

The noise is getting closer and closer, and through the gloom Jude can see them approaching. The thing, the dragging thing that isn’t a stick, looks like a telescopic baton. And it occurs to him suddenly how fucked he is. 

The feet stop in front of his cage. Heavy boots, army boots, and camouflage pants. Jude looks up through the top of the cage and into the face of the beige man. “Hello.”

“What the fuck?”

Beige man pulls a key from his pocket and pushes it into the padlock on the front of the cage, opens the door. “Get out,” he says. 

Jude doesn’t, pushes himself as far back into the cage as he can. 

Beige man sighs. “This is all very unnecessary,” he says, “isn’t it?” He crouches down and reaches in, grabbing Jude’s ankle in one hand and yanking hard. And really, he should be able to fight this, but his head feels full of cotton wool. His limbs feel like they’re made of lead. 

He falls, digs his fingers into the bottom of the cage as the man drags him out. One of his fingernails gives way but the pain doesn’t hit right away. When it does he feels sick, wonders if that’s the key to escaping. 

Beige man locks the cage door before he can even think about crawling back inside and stands over where Jude lies, naked and trembling. He weighs the baton in his hands for a second before striking Jude roughly across the side. 

Winded, ribs broken, Jude curls up and coughs. The noises coming out of him sound far away, like a wounded puppy. 

“Get up,” beige man says, touching the cold metal of the baton to Jude’s arse and the threat is enough. He pushes himself awkwardly to his feet, staggering a little. He sways, takes a shaky breath. 

“You don’t deserve it but you’re going to get a head start,” beige man says, as if he is doing Jude some sort of favour. 

“Huh?”

“Run.”

“What?”

“Run,” beige man says again. 

Jude looks around, panicked. There’s an open door at the end of the barn. He looks back at beige man, at the open door, then he runs. He falls almost right away, lands heavily on his knees, gets up unsteadily and keeps going. His lungs are burning as he picks his way through the cages, and he’s blind with panic in a way he has never been before. 

He makes it out of the barn and stumbles, feet catching on the stones of the unpaved ground outside. There’s a field, a road. He can make it he can make it. 

Then he hears the dogs. 

He can make it. He can. This isn’t how he dies. It can’t be. It won’t be. The field is damp, the grass long and cool. It’s harder to run through, and the dogs are gaining. 

The road is so close, he can see the headlights of cars, hear them come and go and one of them will see him and stop and he will tell then what has happened and about the cages and the people in there and about the beige man. The beige man with the blue car or was it black?

Something pierces his calf and he goes down like a sack of shit. The dogs are on him, then, and he tries to curl up. Protect himself. He tries to fight.

He tries. 

And he thinks of his mum. How unsurprised she’ll be. 

Should have tried harder. 

***

An update on our earlier story. A body found mauled to death in woodland this morning has been identified as that of thirty-two-year-old Jude Harlan. 

Harlan was last seen at the Easy Stop Diner in the early hours of Monday morning. Police are appealing for witnesses.


End file.
